Monday, 23 February 2015

Late last year I published a piece of work that argued that universities need to think about reform, including in disciplinary norms and teaching approaches, in order to do something better for society than they currently do. This was published in the journal Southerly, in part 1 of a special issue on Australian Dreams. I have pasted some introductory paragraphs below - see the journal for the full essay: http://southerlyjournal.com.au/2014/11/19/australian-dreams-1/

No
one asked Australia’s First People what they thought a university should look
like. They did not ask in the 1850s when social and political leaders in Sydney
and Melbourne began to build a dream for Australian higher education; they did
not ask in the 1950s when the Commonwealth government forged a ‘national’
system; they did not ask Aboriginal people for their views in the 1960s when
they added Colleges of Advanced Education, nor in the 1970s when Gough Whitlam
made education free. In the 1960s and 1970s when radicals set up teach-ins and
agonised over alternative visions for tertiary education, Indigenous knowledge
had little place; even when the first Aboriginal education units were emerging
in universities in the 1980s, the long history of Aboriginal learning and
dreaming was peripheral to the idea of the university that was, to the (mostly)
white privileged men who planned and managed higher education, among
Australia’s most sophisticated dreams.

Aboriginal Australians were not alone in their exclusion
from such visions. Among those who colonised the Aboriginal nations, no one
thought to ask any of the thousands of Chinese colonists what they thought
either. It was not their long and
esteemed scholarly traditions that were imagined for Australia. There are
others I could continue to list but there is no need: we know who they are. It
seems a little strange to do so anyway perhaps, but thinking about who did not have a say helps show whose dreaming
universities fulfil. Australian tertiary traditions, despite the meritocratic
rhetoric attached to them, were built on the structures of white supremacy that
characterised British settler colonialism.

We know this, of course. And yet – certainly for those who
choose scholarly vocations – many people harbour a profound love for the
university, at least as an idea, despite its considerable flaws. This may also
be why scholars are so prone to bitter disappointment as they live the bizarre
reality of contemporary higher education, compelled to play the stupid games
its structures coerce. This paper considers the dreams that academics often
believe they have lost. I do not keep focus there, however. These losses are
real and important but scholarly dreams are not the only purpose for the
university. When we think instead about who else
the dream is for, and what universities might achieve in the world, we may
finally start to hammer out a pathway to bigger dreams than our institutions
currently offer or represent.

Sunday, 22 February 2015

Before I began my current job as a lecturer at ACU I was completed a postdoc in the Social Inclusion Unit at the University of Sydney, beginning a project on professions and social hierarchy that I am planning to take up the majority in the next handful of years.

We hopes that this - and work by others in the unit - would help develop a scholarship around social inclusion.

I wrote this piece with the brilliant Annette Cairnduff

A scholarship of social inclusion in higher education: why we need it and what it should look like

Gosh it has been quiet in Hannahland lately - that is because it really hasn't beed quiet in Hannahland!

I'll try to catch up with what I've been up to. One is this article, published last year. This was a side-project I explored after I finished my PhD thesis. The issue bothered me while I wrote it but it was not really relevant. It was an old-fashioned question of what was the truth of the matter...

Here is the abstract:
Until recently, historians assumed that the 1956 ‘Ward case’, in which the historian Russel Ward was denied a lectureship at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales), was an example of Cold War political repression in Australian universities. When this orthodoxy was challenged in the conservative journal Quadrant in 2004, the incident was brought to the edges of Australia’s ‘History Wars’. While it sheds some light on the Cold War intellectual environment, the significance of the case is also derived from its place in this more recent debate, and is boosted by Ward’s status as author of the classic text,TheAustralian Legend (1958). This article draws on previously unexamined records to evaluate the evidence surrounding Ward’s failed appointment.

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About Me

I have kept this blog since 2008. In that time I completed a PhD in the history department at the University of Sydney called “The Ownership of Knowledge in Higher Education in Australia, 1939-1996” and have begun new work. This blog recounts my pathway through my research and thinking to include work on social inclusion, historiography, labour history and the history of knowledge. Hopefully it goes without saying that anything here is a draft. It is a blog, not a book. Lots of times I could be wrong - if I am, please tell me.